Demonstrators hold illuminated signs during a rally supporting the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), or the Dream Act, outside the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., Jan. 18, 2018.
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A federal judge in southern Texas on Friday ordered the Biden administration to stop granting new applications to the Obama-era immigration program that shielded hundreds of thousands of young immigrants from deportation.
But current recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, won’t immediately have their status pulled as a result of the order, the judge noted.
The ruling, which puts in jeopardy the program that President Joe Biden had sought to preserve, came as news outlets reported arrests at the U.S.-Mexico border hitting their highest levels in more than a decade.
Former President Donald Trump had sought to end DACA, but his effort was blocked in 2020 by the Supreme Court, which ruled 5-4 that his order to wind the program down was unlawfully “arbitrary and capricious.”
In a five-page order Friday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen declared, “From this date forward, the United States of America, its departments, agencies, officers, agents, and employees are hereby enjoined from administering the DACA program.”
Those entities are also barred from reimplementing the program without compliance with another law that governs federal regulatory procedure, Hanen’s order said.
The White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The judge’s order said that the DACA program, created in 2012 through a policy memorandum from then-President Barack Obama’s Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano, was “illegally implemented.”
But, since hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients now rely on DACA, Hanen’s order reasoned that “it is not equitable for a government program that has engendered such significant reliance to terminate suddenly.”
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